Yet More Anti-Zombie Manga Comes to U.S.; What is Japan’s Beef with the Undead, Anyway?
The Anti-Zombie products seem to be coming out of the Far East in waves lately:
The North American publisher Vertical has announced at its Anime Weekend Atlanta panel on Sunday that it licensed the Velveteen & Mandara (Becchin to Mandara) manga by Jiro Matsumoto. The story centers around Velveteen (Becchin), a high school girl who lives in a battle tank on a riverbed in Tokyo’s Suginami ward, and her friend Mandara. Together, the two exterminate the zombies of dead Suginami citizens.
So they ‘exterminate’ Zombies with a *tank*?
Wow. The game of one-upsmanship in Anti-Zom mayhem is getting seriously out of hand. At this rate you’ll use nuclear weapons in Resident Evil 6, and by Dead Rising 3 the goal will be to plunge an enormous asteroid from outer space down onto the Earth, eradicating all Unlife (along with living things of course). Doing that will get you the secret ending no doubt.
Yeesh.
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Perhaps you should read the manga first.
It’s not about zombies, even. It’s about the two teenage girls who happen to live in such a world. They don’t fight those zombies with a tank. One of the girls, Becchin, lives in said tank.
Snow: Given that at the time I posted this story the manga had just been licensed for release on this continent, I had no practical and legal method to do that, and had to rely on the publisher’s description. They state that these characters use a tank to kill Zombies en masse, and we objected to that concept.
More broadly, a comic not being ‘about Zombies’ in a world that is populated mostly BY Zombies is itself a questionable property. Why focus exclusively on the handful of Living and ignore the Unlife stories of the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants? I can only assume prejudice.
Again, if the actual product is not in this vein, you should take it up with Vertical or perhaps Anime News Network.
Although, I strongly suspect the issue here isn’t miscommunication about said manga per se but ideological background, and that both you and Vertical are correct; the ‘story’ is about these two characters, ignoring the Undead, but incidentally involves mass Undead slaughter, which you do not perceive as a problem, and which the ZRC of course cannot ignore.